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Love is a blank canvas, and you're free to paint it with whatever colour you want, says this post!
Love is a blank canvas, and you’re free to paint it with whatever colour you want, says this post!
One of the top 5 entries for November’s Muse of the Month writing theme, with the cue “The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!” from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
I spent half my life looking for that perfect shade of crimson. Only I knew what exactly I wanted. And I wanted it bad. I would keep coming across a lot of maroons, violets, and purples. And I was like No! No! No! I want crimson! Sometimes, I would get tired of searching. It was at those moments that I would ponder over vermilion for a while, or toy with the idea of giving the cherry red a chance.
In fact, at one time, the magenta looked sort of nice too. But none of them made me jump up and down screaming – This is what I was looking for! That’s my colour! I didn’t know what it was about crimson that I craved so much. Every time I wondered if I would ever find my perfect shade, I shuddered. Every time I wondered if crimson really existed, I shuddered. Crimson is only red, my friend said, shrugging. Maybe she was right, I thought. But something told me that I should wait. And I did.
And then, one day, when I was least expecting it, I found my colour. And it was not crimson. It was not even close. It was actually a chocolate brown. I could see it was the wrong colour. But I instantly knew this was what I had been looking for. And I dived headlong into it – into the warm, bottomless, mushy chocolate brown. And while I swam happily in its soft fudginess, the crimson that always eluded me surreptitiously came, melted, and dissolved in the chocolate brown, creating a shade that was so exclusively mine that every time I looked at it, my heart exploded into a million shimmery silver stars.
As I swam deeper and deeper in it, I made amazing discoveries. Who could have imagined that it actually changed colours?! Often, there would be bursts of cardinal red, burning hot and high, gushing up from the unknown depths, scorching everything in its way. But, it would retreat as quickly as it came, leaving me basking and breathless in the sultry, fuzzy envelope of its memory and pining for the next outburst.
Then there would be days when it would be a dark, brooding gray – stiflingly opaque, weighing down on my heart, making me wonder whether it’s worth going on.
Then there would be days when it would be a dark, brooding gray – stiflingly opaque, weighing down on my heart, making me wonder whether it’s worth going on. But I would go on anyway. And as a reward for my perseverance, the gray would always fade, shade by shade, to a steely gray first and eventually to silver gray, before turning – surprise! – daffodil yellow!
It’s the kind of yellow that holds the warmth of a thousand splendid suns and I would feel thankful that I didn’t give up. It’s the kind of yellow that promises that my world could be gloomy gray or murky brown, bright orange or lovely pink, soothing green or icy blue, but it would never be an impenetrable black.
Gradually, the rich chocolate brown mellowed down to a cozy caramel. By this time, I knew my way around so well that I didn’t even have to swim. I could just close my eyes and float. But that didn’t mean I would stop making discoveries. Some parts of the caramel are so transparent that I could see right through them, while some are shrouded in a thicker, smoky, mysterious burgundy that somehow keeps the going strong.
I persevered upstream, and I glided downstream; I bathed in waterfalls, I held my breath in rapids; I danced with the waves and surfed the tides; I battled the currents and found hidden treasures deep down. And somewhere along the way, I realized that love has the colour I want it to have. I realized that I was holding the paintbrushes all this while, and the colours that I saw were actually colours from my own soul, projected through my eyes; and that I could choose whether to douse the canvas in thick black or make it erupt in sweeps of red, orange and yellow, or paint intimate intricacies.
I dipped my brush in chocolate brown, and my canvas exploded in a rainbow. And the crimson? What crimson?
pic credit: Image of colours via Shutterstock.
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I huffed, puffed and panted up the hill, taking many rest breaks along the way. My calf muscles pained, my heart protested, and my breathing became heavy at one stage.
“Let’s turn back,” my husband remarked. We stood at the foot of Shravanbelagola – one of the most revered Jain pilgrimage centres. “We will not climb the hill,” he continued.
My husband and I were vacationing in Karnataka. It was the month of May, and even at the early hour of 8 am in the morning, the sun scorched our backs. After visiting Bangalore and Mysore, we had made a planned stop at this holy site in the Southern part of the state en route to Hosur. Even while planning our vacation, my husband was very excited at the prospect of visiting this place and the 18 m high statue of Lord Gometeshwara, considered one of the world’s tallest free-standing monolithic statues.
What we hadn’t bargained for was there would be 1001 granite steps that needed to be climbed to have a close-up view of this colossal magic three thousand feet above sea level on a hilltop. It would be an understatement to term it as an arduous climb.
She was sure she was dying of cancer the first time her periods came. Why did her mother not explain anything? Why did no one say anything?
Sneha still remembers the time when she had her first period.
She was returning home from school in a cycle-rickshaw in which four girls used to commute to school. When she found something sticky on the place where she was sitting, she wanted to hide it, but she would be the first girl to get down and others were bound to notice it. She was a nervous wreck.
As expected, everyone had a hearty laugh seeing her condition. She wondered what the rickshaw-wallah thought of her. Running towards her home, she told her mother about it. And then, she saw. There was blood all over. Was she suffering from some sickness? Cancer? Her maternal uncle had died of blood cancer!
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